


Light In the Shadows

by Schwoozie



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Drabble, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Late at Night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-07 18:47:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19475161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schwoozie/pseuds/Schwoozie
Summary: “Your apartment’s behind you, you know. You lost?”“It’s my fire escape. You’re more lost than I am.”





	Light In the Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to thevampirecat for the one word prompt: "Lost"

Karen doesn’t know why the city looks so different from her perch on the edge of her fire escape—the lights brighter, the smells of cigarette smoke and half-rotted garbage from the street below stronger, the music playing from a corner a few blocks away floating in the air like a ghostly presence—but she doesn’t have the energy to question it. She’s tired. She doesn’t think she’s had a day without feeling tired since she was 19 years old.

Despite it all, the sound of her apartment window squeaking open behind her makes her mouth quirk. It seems that he took her drunken warning—after the third time she came home on the wrong end of midnight to find him with his socked feet on her coffee table and a book in his hand and her curtains fluttering from where he jimmied the window—that if he didn’t want her to rig exploding glitter packets around her window frames he better start using her front door like a goddamned human being, seriously. She didn’t realize until she woke the next morning with a hangover and a glass of water and Advil by the bed (damn him) that she just gave him _carte blanche_ to break in whenever he liked. But it’d be on her terms, at least, and that gave her the reassurance to down the pills and fall back asleep.

It’s just like him to take her so painfully literally when there’s no way he didn’t know she was on the fire escape before he even reached her block. It could be teasing, or his way of proving he respects her boundaries (no matter that they’re always set after he tears the last ones down), but whichever it is, it’s so Frank that she smiles all the same.

He settles beside her and the city changes. Becomes quieter, smaller, shrunk to the iron boundaries of the platform they sit on, dozens of yards above the street. She doesn’t turn her head but he’s there in the corner of her eye, a few days of beard on his face and hair just beginning to curl at the ends. He’s in black, but not in armor. She knows without looking that there’s a gun at the small of his back and a few knives in his boots, but no fresh bruises. His presence is heavier when there are, like it isn’t only his blood pooling under his skin.

But not tonight. Tonight, he settles with his bicep brushing her shoulder and neither of them shift away. She doesn’t lean into him but her head tilts like it will make his heartbeat loud enough to hear.

“Your apartment’s behind you, you know. You lost?”

Karen looks at the sky. It’s a cloudless night, but the city has always been louder than the stars. If she squints she imagines she can see one or two twinkling.

“It’s my fire escape. You’re more lost than I am.”

He chuckles, a rumble of gravel in his chest. She does lean into him now, and he leans right back, solid and warm.

“I know where I am.”

They’ll go inside in a few minutes. He sent some coffee beans to her work a few days ago and she’s been waiting for him to come by so they can try them together.

But that’s a few minutes away. Now, he’s slung his forearms over the railing, is humming a tune that makes Karen think of open windows and the smell of the woods after it rains, lights that flicker beyond plain white curtains before slowly, softly, blinking out.


End file.
